Near the Torrance City Hall building at Torrance Blvd. and Maple Ave. stands the city’s elegant veterans memorial, which calls the roll of residents who lost their lives in defense of our country.
In the years following World War II, though, a far more elaborate veterans memorial nearly became a reality.
The idea to create a $200,000 veterans memorial auditorium with meeting rooms, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a full kitchen, a rooftop garden with badminton and shuffleboard courts and more first surfaced at a city council meeting in December 1944.
Chamber of Commerce president Harry B. Lewis presented the proposal to the council. The building would have many uses. In addition to meeting places for various veterans groups, the Boy Scouts and other community groups would use the structure.
Admission would be charged to the general public to use its swimming pool, gym, and other facilities to help finance the project, to be built on three city lots near El Prado and Cravens avenues in downtown Torrance.
The council chose not to go with the fanciful and expensive plan, but the seed had been planted. One of the veterans groups involved, Torrance Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 3251, took the idea and revamped it.
Its commander, C. Earl Conner, got behind the planned veterans center in a big way. The World War I veteran had become highly influential in the community. Conner won election to the City Council in 1926, and, in 1933, defeated the controversial William Klusman to become mayor.
Conner’s mayoral tenure lasted only until February 1934, when he resigned the post in order to accept a federal appointment as the city’s new postmaster. As we noted in a 2015 post, he served in that position until 1949.
He became the driving force behind the movement to get the veterans memorial built. Instead of a whole new building, the VFW plan called for a makeover of the former Torrance Ford dealership location at 1606 Cabrillo Ave., near Gramercy Ave.
The garage building on the site had become a dilapidated eyesore since the car dealership suffered damage during the 1941 earthquake and was forced to close.
In early 1945, the VFW paid $12,000 for the site, and began an intensive fundraising drive to cover the cost of remaking into a veterans center that could serve the post’s 1,500 members and other community groups. The group set a goal of $20,000 in contributions from businesses, individuals and organizations.
That October, members of the group even began some preliminary work on the old building they hoped to revamp. The fundraising effort had enthusiasm behind it, with regular optimistic progress reports appearing in the Torrance Herald, whose publisher, Grover Whyte, was a strong supporter of the project.
It’s hard to pinpoint just where the campaign faltered. The last news reported about the project came in April 1946, when the VFW purchased a two-story metal building from the California Shipbuilding Co. on Terminal Island that it planned to move to the Torrance site and reshape into the veterans center.
A year later, in May 1947, the Torrance Herald reported that the lot once proposed to be developed on Cabrillo had been resold, and the Chamber of Commerce was calling for the city to remove the unsightly brick walls and other remaining structures on it. The dream had died.
Any remaining momentum to build the center probably vanished with the death of its most active supporter. Torrance postmaster Earl Conner died suddenly of a heart attack on Feb. 3, 1949. His wife, Clara, took over the job for him, and she served as postmaster until 1965.
The Torrance Junior Chamber of Commerce managed to get a small memorial built near the new City Hall building when it opened in 1956, but the plans to commemorate veterans with a grand gesture along the lines of the auditorium at Veterans Memorial Park in Culver City or Long Beach’s Veteran’s Stadium never happened.
In the late 1990s, another drive began to build a larger outdoor memorial to the city’s veterans. In 2001, California Assemblyman George Nakano, D-Torrance, secured a $100,000 state grant for the project and the city put up $5,000. The total cost for the memorial had been put at about $200,000.
The memorial would have all the names of those who died etched in marble, much like the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks added momentum to the drive to erect the five-by-twelve foot granite monument.
The city of Torrance ended up funding the remainder of the construction costs, and the Torrance Veterans Memorial was dedicated on March 19, 2002. The project was fully completed in March 2003.
On the third Saturday of every month, members of the Vietnam Veterans of America South Bay Chapter 53 spend time maintaining the monument and its surrounding grounds as a reminder to us all of the sacrifices of the 146 persons who names are memorialized there.
Sources:
“Articles Related to South Bay Chapter,” Vietnam Veterans of America website.
Daily Breeze archives.
Torrance Press Herald archives.
“Veterans Memorial and Hometown Heroes,” City of Torrance website.
